Then I slid on my glasses and pressed my face close to the window. Below me, Ben sat on a stool, his knees on either side of an old barrel, something fluffy and gray flailing in his hands. Birds. Ben had a handful of baby pigeons, their tiny necks clamped tightly between each finger. One at a time, he twisted their heads, slit their throats, and held their bodies over the barrel to allow the blood to drain down the inner edge.
Once all of the birds had suffered their quick and violent deaths, Ben must have sensed that he was being watched. He looked up and found me behind the glass. I raised my hand alongside my face and gave a wave. Ben rose to his feet and lifted his bounty, all those carcasses, high overhead. He smiled at me, his grin enormous. For two years, my father-in-law had been repentant, remorseful for his betrayal. But now, his penance was over. Ben was back—Ben the hunter, the provider, the lover.
I understood then that the squabs would be his offering to my mother. Just as soon as Jack and I turned our backs and were on our way to the airport, Ben would take his leave of the house as well and rush to where my mother awaited him with open arms.
Twenty-two
Back in San DIEGO, I struggled to get through the days. Margot continued to sustain me with novels—The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, Mrs. Dalloway—while also pulling out the heavy artillery and adding poetry to the mix: Derek Walcott, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich. I read and read, swimming toward certain ideas as if they were buoys to cling to in the open ocean. My stepmother started to address the topic of Malabar directly, suggesting that I needed to create more emotional distance between us.
“I also had a mother who didn’t know how to nurture,” Margot said. “You’re going to have to learn to do that for yourself.”
When I sprang to Malabar’s defense as I always did, Margot did not back down. “I understand some of your mother’s history,” she said. “And I gather Malabar did better by you than her mother did by her, but that’s not the point.”
I bristled at what my father might have told Margot about my mother’s relationship with her mother, feeling protective of their ancient secrets. Could Margot know about their horrific fight, the one that landed my mother in the hospital? Did she know about the necklace and my mother’s outsize attachment to it?
“It’s you I care about,” Margot said. “There’s no dress rehearsal here. You only get one life, Rennie, and it’s time you get on with yours.”
I couldn’t imagine how I was going to do that. I was twenty-seven, but I felt so much older, as if the best years of my life had already slipped past me, not fully lived.
“You have to remember that your mother is unaware of what she’s done and always will be,” Margot continued. “If you’re waiting for an apology or gratitude, don’t. You have hard work ahead. You need to forgive her and move on. Happiness is a choice that you have to make for yourself.”
At Margot’s pressing, I sought out the help of her psychiatrist. Beneath her austere accent—German, I think—and frank manner, Dr. B. was gentle and empathetic. She took my distress seriously.
We experimented with talk therapy first. I told Dr. B. about the dead brother with whom I shared a birthday, about my parents’ divorce and their subsequent remarriages, about how, when I was fourteen, my mother had woken me to tell me about Ben’s kiss and how I’d become seduced and complicit, lying to family and friends. I told her about my abiding guilt for deceiving Charles and Lily and my own checkered history of love affairs and infidelities, including the fact that when I’d met Jack on Harbour Island, I’d had a boyfriend whom I’d essentially stolen from another woman. I also confessed that I’d neglected to tell Jack about our parents’ romance even as I made plans to marry him. I left nothing out.
I described the symptoms of my depression, which had now been going on for two years, and the barrage of angry, condemning voices in my head. I even showed her fresh wounds on my arms from where I’d started cutting myself and described the relief I felt from sliding a knife across the underside of my wrist and watching all those red dots blossom into a single line. Voices gone. Pain eased. Peace found.
“Have you ever considered,” Dr. B. asked, looking at me over her spectacles, “that because you didn’t separate from your mother during adolescence, you are having to do that work now?”
I nodded for her to continue, wondering if she herself was a mother. She looked to be around sixty, Malabar’s age.
“I think your depression might have to do with knowing you need to dismantle the unrealistic version of your mother that you hold in your heart. Would you agree that you idolize her?”
Why was everything always my mother’s fault? Did I not have agency in this mess I’d made? I didn’t idolize my mother, I told Dr. B.; I understood her. I was aware that it was inappropriate for Malabar to have involved me in her affair, but she’d had a hard life—an alcoholic mother, a dead son, a failed first marriage, a second husband incapacitated by strokes before their life together really began, now dead as well. All I’d ever wanted was for my mother to be happy and loved. I felt pretty sure this was what she wanted for me too.
Dr. B. rephrased. “Do you think your mother puts you first?”
My silence answered the question.
Over the course of our weekly sessions, Dr. B. pointed out all of the ways I placed my mother’s needs before my own. She would alert me each time I made excuses for Malabar’s behavior.
“Do you think it is possible that you might have fallen in love with Jack to please your mother?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. I listed Jack’s abundant love-worthy qualities. “Malabar had nothing to do with that.”
Dr. B. smiled. I wanted to slap her.
When, after a few months of weekly conversations, my depression gave no signs of easing and I was still exhausted and unable to see a brighter time ahead, Dr. B. prescribed an antidepressant. A few weeks into taking the drug, I felt a swell start to form beneath me and found that I could catch the wave and be lifted and propelled forward. These rides were nothing short of miraculous—my appetite back, ideas flowing, the future visible. But the waves soon flattened, leaving me adrift again. Dr. B. tinkered with different combinations of medications—a higher dose of this, a dash of that. With each new cocktail, I marveled at her ability to summon the wind and tide. My mood would lift, and, for a few euphoric days or weeks, I could see my life more clearly. But nothing worked over the long haul. A little lift meant a little fall; a bigger lift, a bigger fall.
* * *
In Massachusetts, Malabar and Ben joined their lives together at a speed that shocked even our family and closest friends. None of us were surprised they’d found their way back to each other, but given the scandal surrounding the discovery of their affair coupled with Lily’s death being so recent, the assumption—the hope—was that propriety would dictate timing. We felt sure they’d wait at least a year before making their relationship public.
They did not.
Ben moved into Malabar’s house on Cape Cod within two months of Lily’s death. Soon after, they announced their intention to marry.
Jack and Hannah objected for the sake of their mother’s dignity.
“What’s the rush, exactly?” Jack asked his father.
I begged my mother to wait. “You already won,” I said, attempting to flatter her. “You’ve got the guy. For the sake of Jack’s and Hannah’s and everyone’s feelings, why not hold off, even just a few more months?”
Our collective pleas fell on deaf ears. If anything, our objections seemed to strengthen Malabar’s resolve. She refused to budge. Having been deprived of a legitimate relationship for more than a dozen years, she felt she’d waited long enough. And Ben, who had endured Lily’s heartbreak for two years, was committed to making Malabar happy. My mother and Ben—sixty-one and seventy-five years old, respectively—decided to marry in early September, nine and a half months after Lily’s death.
Ben and Malabar’s wedding took place on my mother’s property not fif
ty feet from where Jack and I had married three years earlier. Their guests, numbering around twenty-five, had also attended our wedding. They included Ben’s siblings and their spouses, my mother’s half brother and his family, and a few close friends. I surmised that most of the guests had known about the affair but also that they assumed they were the only ones in on the secret. The minister, from Plymouth, was a close friend of both families. He’d given the eulogy at Charles’s funeral. I wondered if he knew too. I scanned the crowd, fixated on trying to identify allegiances—who was happy for Malabar and who was distraught for Lily.
Ben stood on one side of the reverend, Jack and I—best man and matron of honor—on the other, our backs to the bay. As we awaited the bride, I studied the expressions on the faces of the guests, some smiling, others grim. Then Malabar emerged through the sliding glass doors, radiant in an ivory Chanel suit, clutching a bouquet of pale flowers. She stepped off her deck and started up the aisle toward her husband-to-be. To this day, I’ve never seen my mother look happier.
Behind her, Jack’s sister had tears streaming down her face.
As if sensing the collision of my conflicting emotions, Jack leaned into me and made a joke. “Have you thought about what Thanksgivings and Christmases will be like for the rest of our lives?”
I laughed. The situation was wholly absurd: Our parents were tying the knot as ours was unraveling. We hadn’t told anyone; we’d barely admitted it to ourselves. And we still loved each other.
When our parents said, “I do,” and kissed, our lives transformed. My mother became Jack’s stepmother. My father-in-law became my stepfather. And Jack would forevermore be my stepbrother.
Later, at the reception, I downed two glasses of wine before the hors d’oeuvres even started to circulate. Jack and I presented our parents with our gift—we’d rewritten the lyrics to the song “I’m My Own Grandpa.” In the original version, the narrator marries a widow who has an adult daughter. When his father marries that daughter, he becomes his own grandfather. In our version, “I’m My Own In-Law,” we lamented the whiff of incest, mistaken though it was, that we knew would dog us for the rest of our lives. The song was a hit, and our family roared its approval, everyone relieved to find something humorous in the occasion.
* * *
“Does your life feel authentically your own?” Dr. B. asked during a session.
“I’m not even sure I know what that means,” I said, increasingly annoyed by our discussions. My marriage was falling apart; I was working as a legislative aide on track to becoming a bureaucrat, which I didn’t want to be; and I was living in a town where I felt isolated and misunderstood. I longed for a more meaningful life but couldn’t begin to articulate what I meant by this. I felt tyrannized by my desire to be elsewhere and awash in guilt at the thought of leaving Jack.
“It means you’re aware of how you are feeling and have chosen the path you’re on.”
I focused on the cube of amber that sat on her desk, an insect trapped within it. How soon after stepping into the tree sap had that bug realized its mistake? There were no signs of any struggle; all of its legs were perfectly aligned. Stupid beetle, I thought.
“Still with me?” Dr. B. asked.
I was, but barely.
I was trying to picture what mattered to me—what was the life I wanted to live? I thought of books, close friends, and conversations that skewed toward life’s bigger questions. These were the things I truly cared about, not local political issues, Monday-night football games, or the SoCal beach culture. I blinked. I’d done it. Somehow, I’d penetrated the looking glass and briefly imagined the life I wanted. It wasn’t so hard to envision after all.
I had been on antidepressants, to little effect, for around six months when Dr. B. took the bold step of adding lithium to my mood-altering cocktail. The drug was normally used to treat bipolar disorder, she explained, but she’d had success with lithium for patients like me who had not responded adequately to traditional treatments.
When the new drug hit my system, the results were swift and powerful. This was more a tsunami than a wave. Up, up, up I went, as if a whole ocean had been sucked up to form a rogue seiche. From the crest, I could see far beyond my own life. I had a bird’s-eye view of not just myself but what felt like all of humanity—but all I could see was futility and despair. After a few weeks on lithium, I became suicidal, fantasizing in painstaking detail the ways in which I might kill myself. Pills were an appealing option, readily available and seemingly not too gruesome, except I had no idea what and how much to take. I found romance in imagining a spectacular plunge from a bridge or a building but couldn’t bear the thought of some poor soul having to scrape up my mess. In the end, it was Jack’s gun, kept in a drawer in his bedside table, that captured my imagination. I took to holding it while lying in our empty bathtub. I liked to feel the cold weight of it in my palm.
The suicidal ideations were, in the end, what catapulted me into unexpected action. Under Dr. B.’s supervision, I stopped taking all antidepressant medication and made a life plan instead: I would move to New York City and attempt to enter the literary world. Jack and I would test-drive a long-distance marriage. It was time for me to chase my own life and find a path away from the wreck.
* * *
I can still remember getting out of the cab in New York City and walking toward my new home, toward this strange new life, as if in slow motion. I’d sublet the apartment sight unseen from a friend of a friend. It was on Lexington Avenue in Murray Hill, catty-corner to a Curry in a Hurry restaurant and over a frame shop. Cars honked. Pedestrians marched determinedly. A homeless man sat cross-legged on my stoop next to a cat and a litter of kittens, one of which I would adopt in the coming weeks.
I started up the stairs lugging a single large suitcase. When I made it to the third-floor walkup and stood in front of my door, I took a deep breath. I slid the key into the lock and turned it; it clicked, then released. I pushed the door, and it swung open. From where I stood, I could behold almost all five hundred square feet of my new home. First, I felt the pleasantly exhausted sensation of having pulled into my driveway after being on a long road trip. Then I nearly choked on the feeling of arriving home.
Twenty-three
In the early YEARS of Malabar and Ben’s marriage, they went on the lavish trips she’d dreamed of: honeymooning in Italy, chartering a gulet to cruise the Turkish coast, bird watching in South Africa. My mother wrote travel pieces about their adventures that appeared in the New York Times and glossy magazines, and Ben glowed with pride at her accomplishments. At long last happily married, Malabar was ready to hang up her apron. She still adored haute cuisine but now far preferred eating out to cooking at home, and her new husband was more than happy to accommodate her desires. Although Ben still hunted at every opportunity, the wild-game cookbook languished. It never found a publisher or a proper home, though it had unquestionably served its intended purpose and then some.
Their first marital project was a renovation of my mother’s Cape house that nearly doubled its footprint. On the ground floor, they added a master bedroom suite and an enormous rectangular living room, designed specifically to house a prized oriental rug of Ben’s. One of the long walls was composed of sliding glass doors; the opposite one was originally intended to showcase Ben’s hunting trophies, his dozens of heads, antlers, tusks, and horns, all expertly mounted. But in the end, Malabar decided she preferred fine art to animal parts, and Ben’s trophies were rerouted to a dehumidified room in the basement created for just that purpose.
If Malabar was euphoric about her own life, she was far less pleased with mine. By moving to New York, I was jeopardizing the uniquely modern family she had created—mother and daughter married to father and son. According to her, Ben was upset for Jack and concerned he would see less of his son without me to help lure him back east several times a year. Malabar did not want her husband to be unhappy.
On her first visit to my new home, my mother made
a point of allowing me to see my shabby apartment through her eyes. Always discerning when it came to life’s fineries, she stepped across the threshold and her gaze drifted to paint-chipped corners, across putty-colored electrical outlets and grimy windows, and onto the solitary light fixture in the kitchen, the base of which held a couple of dead flies.
“I know,” I said. “It needs work. A good cleaning. Some TLC.”
Malabar looked into the windowless alcove that was my bedroom and at the two stacks of books, all from Margot, that served as makeshift nightstands. She exhaled audibly.
“I plan to build floor-to-ceiling shelves over here,” I said, gesturing toward the entry area. “And once my books have a permanent home, I’ll get real nightstands.”
But even as I spoke, my mother’s attention moved again. She looked past the main living area to the kitchen beyond, off of which was a bolted door leading to a rusted fire escape where I planned to grow potted tomatoes in the spring. Under Malabar’s scrutiny, the courtyard below transformed into a junkyard, and the single large tree, whose leafy branches I envisioned would paint my windows green in the spring, were revealed as grocery-bag repositories.
“I presume it’s quiet, at least?” my mother said, her voice disconcertingly formal.
“Very quiet,” I said. “And Kalustyan’s is just one block away.” As if the apartment’s proximity to my mother’s favorite spice shop made it more desirable.
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